The Legacy of Aemilia Drusilla

[Domna]

The door was built of thick oak, and situated at the end of two halls, it gave some sense of being a way out whenever the physician found herself standing before it. There were never the muffled words or the sounds of chairs scraping and footfalls landing on the floor beyond it that she often heard beyond the doors of others. There was peaceful silence beyond the door, and Aemilia knew that Malik lived there. It was more than a place to rest his head. He had made it his sanctuary, and on the infrequent occasions that her knocking on the door drew him to the interruption, he always invited her in.

So she held her breath every time she stood before the door, and as the weeks turned to months, the door became an increasingly foreboding obstacle to finding her own peace there with the Prodean. That day was not unlike so many others. Her gentle knocking was met with no response. She knocked harder, and still, there was no response. Aemilia wondered if he wasn’t there or if the day was just one in which the man could not muster the energy to wear a kind face for and speak with a warm voice to her. His distant nature had convinced her that what time he spent with her, he spent reluctantly. She wasn’t sure of the reasons, but her mind played at what they might be. They were cruel, selfish reasons she imagined, yet the man never behaved cruelly towards her, and on those days he did answer his door, her worries dissipated as though they had never been.

The door stood before her, her knocking gone unanswered. It felt like she’d been turned away. She hadn’t come to beg, but she found herself suddenly feeling as though it had been a plea that had gone unanswered. She hadn’t been expecting the pang of pain to pierce her chest, but there it was. She was wounded by his absence, and she felt like a fool for being cut so easily by it. As quickly as she withdrew from the door, she entered into a room that was up for rent just a few meters past. She could create her own sanctuary, she had thought. From around the corner, she heard the knock, and she peered out from around the doorway to find Ashi waiting there at Malik’s door, also unanswered.

The physician had seen Ashi and Malik together before. There was such a fondness in the way they looked at each other and touched each other, Aemilia was frequently compelled to avert her eyes to grant them privacy for what intimacy there must have been between them. Yet there, the tiny, beloved Ashi was just as alone as the physician. The pain had faded from her chest. Ashi spoke of a dangerous monastery that she had wanted Malik to escort her to. Aemilia offered her own blade up to protect the woman, but Ashi politely refused. The absent man had exuded power for as long as Aemilia had known him, and so she understood. She’d found sanctuary in him too.

Aemilia’s own deficiencies haunted her. Countless times, she had caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, and she had paused to stare back at herself bitterly, willing everything about herself to change. She was the reason, she told herself, that the rest were gone. She was why they’d never stay, and she was why they’d always keep her out. As she watched Ashi, she was wounded by the comfort she took in knowing that even the beloved could find themselves on this side of the locked door. She felt guilty for feeling it, but she couldn’t help herself. Maybe she wasn’t so lacking in something that had cursed her that way. Ashi wasn’t lacking at all.

[Domna]

The Glade was maddening. It harbored all kinds, but it was never meant for Aemilia. Something splintered within her every time she stepped foot there, something disturbed and unwell. She could feel herself float, like a woman adrift in a sea while all the surrounding trees dug their roots so deep down. She never took hold there. She just drifted, grip lost. Sometimes, she found herself back on the road to Fort Praesidium before she remembered herself and landed where she could feel her feet again on the ground and where all the splintered pieces seemed to reconvene where the rest made sense again, away from whatever madness had set in before.

It unsettled her. She had asked once why it was that the Glade was so unconcerned with its own discovery, and she had been told that those who took refuge there did not cause much trouble and that the Republic was aware of its activities there. Aemilia had been skeptical. She wondered then if they were aware too of the happenings of the Ashwalkers, but when she had asked, she had found no answer. So she was left to accept that there really was corruption there, soaked deep down into the soil that the forest so greedily took root in. It grew, and it spread in time, ever more dark and maddening.

[Domna]

The library was a quiet little haven, hidden away from the rest of the province and beyond the gnarled forest. Aemilia sat amidst the dust blanketing the old floorboards, reading from the time the Flame rose into the sky until it had long disappeared again and the physician found it necessary to continue on with by candlelight. When she finished one book, she simply moved on to the next. She kept their company as if their pages were the weather-worn faces of those Society had forgotten, whispering nearly forgotten tales to her so they might not fade altogether when the faded ink became illegible or their tearing spines finally broke. Aemilia would remember, and those old faces would never die then.